http://lasindias.com/ multinational worker cooperative, Las Indias
In this interview, Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo, John Robb of Global Guerrillas, and P2P foundation's Michel Bauwens talk to David de Ugarte, one of the originators of the Spanish cyberpunk scene about his more recent work developing a multinational worker cooperative, Las Indias, that is a culmination of his community's thinking and work for the last decade.
Las Indias is the manifestation of a unique socio-economic philosophy that synthesizes many strains of thinking and culture including cyberpunk, anarchism, network thinking, and cooperatives - all with a Spanish twist. It's important because it points to a possible future for those who think outside of national boundaries and desire or need to take control of their own economic destiny. It's a possible future that takes the centuries old logic of cooperatives and remixes it for the urban-centered, global network society we live in today.
Michel Bauwens: Explain to us what Las Indias is, and where it comes from, and what makes it distinctive?
David de Ugarte: Las Indias is the result of the Spanish-speaking cyberpunk movement. Originally a civil rights group, during the late 90s it became strongly influenced by Juan Urrutia's “Economics of Abundance” theory. Very soon, we linked “abundance” with the idea of empowerment in distributed networks. We are very clear on this point: it is not the Internet by itself, it is the distributed P2P architecture that allows the new commons. As one of our old slogans put it: “Under every informational architechture lays a structure of power.” Re-centralizing structures – as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Megaupload, etc. do around their servers – weakens us all. The blogosphere, torrents, freenet, etc. are tools of empowerment.
http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-future-now-an-interview-with-david-de-...